“Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair,” Annie Dillard says of writing; reading often has a similar self-propelling precarity to it. Page 271 of the Phenomenology of Perception was one of those diminutive daily passions. Two hundred and seventy pages in, my eyes were crossing as, ironically, they tried to follow a description of … Continue reading Courageous Specialization

February 2015’s issue of The Hillsdale Forum is here. Inside: five essays (including a review), two interviews, a “humor” item, and, least of all, this letter. Briefly, senior Sean Kunath explains why he loves his fountain pens so much (page 10), and Assistant Professor of Education Dr. Jeffrey Lehman explains just a bit of what we talk about when we talk about the liberal arts … Continue reading Letter From the Editor, February 2015

(Greg Wolfe’s mission inspires a reading of Keats’ well-known poem) This essay is adapted from a paper originally written for Dr. Lorraine Eadie’s ENG 330: Restoration and Romantic British Literature. “Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.” In his lecture “Conservatism and the Arts: A Lover’s Quarrel,” [Hillsdale College, October 2014] Greg Wolfe argued that in order to conserve what is good, true, and beautiful, the form … Continue reading John Keats’ Vision for Art in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

by Sean Kunath Should you use fountain pens? This may seem like a rather straight-forward question with an answer decidedly in the negative, but I hope to make the redeeming argument for this relic of a bygone era by demonstrating its superior functionality and formality. In the past, when I have extolled the virtues of the fountain pen to some one or other person, the … Continue reading Fountain Pens

(How and why students should foster healthy town-gown relationships) By Micah Meadowcroft When junior Forester McClatchey, the Collegian’s cartoonist, sketched a bewildered college student faced with the improbable varieties and combinations of food available at the Hillsdale County Fair, what was a joke about artery-defying fried fair food became, for some, a cause for offense. A few Hillsdale natives took to Facebook to vent their … Continue reading Historic Hillsdale, Home of Hillsdale College

compiled by Wes Wright Hillsdale College greatly values its core, those classes that unite us and provide an introit into the liberal arts. With Russell Kirk we recognize the ability of the liberal arts to order one’s soul, to turn one’s attention to the higher things. Yet while we can speak of the liberal arts generally, it is often difficult for Hillsdale students to justify … Continue reading Interview With Dr. Jeffrey Lehman